| I recently participated in an online survey
voting for the Top 100 Fantasy books of all time.
Not surprising – to me, anyway, since it's my pick
too – is that J.R.R. Tolkien's
Lord of the Rings was at the top of the Top 100
list.
I blogged this week about my personal all-time favorite books
– the ones I add to my personal library and read over
and over again – and LOTR is at the top of that list
too. I discovered Tolkien's epic in high school, and immediately
fell in love with Middle Earth.
I read The
Hobbit first – which is also on the Top 100
list, in the No. 3 position. It's enchanting and magical,
and a delightful prequel to LOTR. But Lord of the Rings
is the heart and soul of Tolkien, awesome and heartbreaking
and splendid.
You could vote for up to 10 books in the Top 100 nominees,
so I put in a vote as well for The
Haunting of Hill House.
It's been years since I've read Shirley Jackson's 1959 novel.
A finalist for the National Book Award, it's rightfully considered
by many to be one of the best literary ghost stories published
in the 20th century.
To me, Hill House is exactly what a ghost story
should be, relying on terror and the reader's imagination
rather than graphic gore.
A couple of the nominated Top 100 books surprised me, mainly
because I don't think of them as “fantasy.” One
was George Orwell's Animal
Farm, written as an allegory of the Communist takeover
of Russia in the early 1900s. I do consider it a must-read,
even these days, in its tale of how the animals – led
by the pigs – overthrow their farmer-owner and his family
and take control of the farm on which they live.
The book's ending – spoiler alert here – is chilling
as it describes how the other animals on the farm look through
the farm-house window at the pigs as they sit around the table
… And the animals see no difference between the pigs
and the humans they replaced.
Animal Farm was at No. 35 on the Top 100 list when
I participated in the poll.
The other book that surprised me by its inclusion is Homer's
Odyssey. I guess that's because I tend to think of “fantasy”
as being created for readers who know the plot is …
well … “fantastical.” In Homer's day, people
accepted the reality of the gods and their magic.
However, that's probably splitting hairs. The
Odyssey is No. 44 in the poll.
I cast one of my votes for Dennis McKiernan's Dragondoom,
and another for Kim Harrison's Dead
Witch Walking.
Dragondoom is one of the books in McKiernan's Mithgar
series, and there are others in the series that I like better.
Eye
of the Hunter and
Voyage of the Foxrider spring to mind, probably
because they feature elves.
Anyone who knows me knows that – like Tolkien's Hobbit
character Sam Gamgee – I am enamored of elves. Dragondoom
is a beautiful if tragic tale, and it well deserves a place
in the Top 100.
Dead Witch is the first book in Harrison's “Hollows”
series featuring bounty-hunting witch Rachel Morgan and her
friends, including a fecund pixie names Jenks and Ivy, a living
vampire. It's the first of Harrison's books that I read, and
it sent me on a hunt for more.
If you'd like to check out the list, and maybe cast your
own vote, here's the link: http://fantasy100.sffjazz.com/lists_books.html.
There's also a Top 100 Science Fiction books list
that I plan to check out.
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